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Monthly Archives: April 2010

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I was talking to a few developers this week and they were telling me that they were really psyched about Flash Builder 4 but were waiting to upgrade. When I asked why, they explained that they were in the middle of Flex 3 projects and didn’t want to transition to the new Flex 4 SDK until they completed the project. I realized that in all of our excitement about Flex 4 and the new Spark component model, that we neglected to let everyone know that 80% of the new features in Flash Builder 4 can help you immediately with your Flex 3 application development. Andrew Shorten just posted a great new article in the Flex Developer Center explaining how to set up Flash Builder 4 so you can continue working on your Flex 3 projects with no disruption while taking advantage of the great new features. This article is a one-stop-shop to learn all things about migration, including both tool and SDK. James Ward also posted a short video where you can see Flash Builder 4 in action working on a Flex 3 project.

I was talking to a few developers this week and they were telling me that they were really psyched about Flash Builder 4 but were waiting to upgrade. When I asked why, they explained that they were in the middle of Flex 3 projects and didn’t want to transition to the new Flex 4 SDK until they completed the project. I realized that in all of our excitement about Flex 4 and the new Spark component model, that we neglected to let everyone know that 80% of the new features in Flash Builder 4 can help you immediately with your Flex 3 application development. Andrew Shorten just posted a great new article in the Flex Developer Center explaining how to set up Flash Builder 4 so you can continue working on your Flex 3 projects with no disruption while taking advantage of the great new features. This article is a one-stop-shop to learn all things about migration, including both tool and SDK. James Ward also posted a short video where you can see Flash Builder 4 in action working on a Flex 3 project.

FITC Toronto is done for another year and it was again a great event. This year there seemed to be a lot more students and the turnout in general was fantastic. During the conference I did a dead drop for Master Collection CS5, an unlocked Google Nexus One, and admission onto the AIR for Android private beta. Due to my schedule at the conference, this one only consisted of three steps, but it still gave people plenty of trouble. Below are the solutions.

The Good Shepherd

The first clue was fairly straightforward. The image on the left is of Matt Damon from the movie The Good Shepherd. In addition to that you can see the word street on the handrail. A quick look of the streets around the Hilton would reveal Edward street. Edward was the name of the character played by Damon. On Edward street you will find the billboard shown in the image at the right. Comparing the actual location to the photo would reveal that the numbers were removed from the photo. Putting those numbers into the form will get you to the next step. Several people did not recognize Matt Damon and at least one person thought it was Johnny Depp. One person solved this by finding a map of all of the ad locations in the city and somehow they got the correct number.

Japanese Subway

The next step consisted of a photograph taken from the Flickr feed of Mike Chambers. Everyone was definitely over thinking on this one as all you needed to do was to take the image into Photoshop and zoom in on it. Many people were printing out maps of the Tokyo subway and trying to determine the station shown in the photo. If you adjusted the levels of the photo you would see the answer (WH975) printed on the back of a lady’s leg.

The Finish

The last step consisted of the photo above with the text Hilton 31. This was quite easy as you only needed to go to the 31st floor and retrieve the dead drop coin from the pillow shown in the photo. There were several teams that were close to winning, but the prize went to Raz Peel. This was actually great because Raz came in second last year and he worked his ass off on that one. Congratulations Raz!

Even though I already have FP10.1 installed on my Nexus One (one of the many perks of working at Adobe ;-)), I’m very happy to see that we will be releasing a public preview of Flash Player 10.1 for Android on my birthday… eh I mean… at Google I/O on May 19th/20th.
Ever since I switched […]

A new Flash Player, code-named “Gala,” will be is now live for preview. One of the newest features of this release is support for H.264 video hardware decoding on Mac OS X 10.6.3. Note that Flash Player has supported H.264, the codec behind HD, since 2007. This newest release, with support for video hardware decoding, should logically make for a much better video performance on supported versions of OSX.

From the release:

“Gala allows developers to preview Flash Player with hardware acceleration of H.264 video on supported Mac computers equipped with the following GPUs: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M. The hardware acceleration functionality in the Gala preview release of Flash Player is expected to be included in an update following the release of Flash Player 10.1.”

Trying to figure out how to combine the need for mobile media with a more and more decreasing attention span? In this case Neave television is the perfect solution for you upcoming Flash Player 10.1 mobile device.

Network Monitor is a new feature available only in Flash Builder 4 Premium. Basically it helps you to see what is happening when you run your Flex project and you bring data using services such as RemoteObject, HTTPService, WebService etc. You can inspect the request and response body, you can see how long it take […]

Great news for Flash web video. Apple recently exposed their H.264 GPU decoding hardware APIs, and Flash Player 10.1 will be able to use them. This means a significant performance boost for Flash Video on the Mac.